I thought this was interesting…while America drowns in red ink from a combination of Bush tax cuts and the money pit known as Iraq, Iraq has been racking up nice profits from selling all that oil they have. This year’s spike in oil prices has been especially good for Iraq — according to this website, they’re on track to have a budget surplus of more than $50 billion by year’s end. By contrast, America faces an estimated budget deficit of more than $400 billion for 2008, which includes this year’s portion of roughly $50 billion the U.S. has paid since 2003 to help stabilize and rebuild Iraq.

Here is the simple goal for those participating in Naked Bike Ride: Protest our dependency on oil and celebrate the power and individuality of our bodies. In America, most people tend to have a warped attitude toward bicycles. They see bicycles as toys and amusements, not as incredibly efficient and serious modes of transportation. More than anything else, Naked Bike Ride is an attempt to change this attitude and to get people to choose bicycles rather than gas guzzling motor vehicles, whenever possible.

This combination was pure marketing genius. If 1,000 people had assembled in the middle of St. Louis to promote alternative sustainable methods of transportation, the media wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass. Because these organizers promised to wrap this serious message about bicycle riding in a package of nudity, however, the media was there in droves.  Here’s an video interview of two of the organizers.

Now, what kind of nudity did those curious media types actually see when they got to the assembly prior to the bicycle ride? Well, they saw some of this:

As well as some of this:

The evening could also have been accurately called Slogans Painted on Partially Naked People on Bikes Night, but that would have been unwieldy.

This use of nakedness to promote the message that we desperately need to start using sustainable transportation methods has been successfully executed in numerous other cities. Tonight, the event came to my home town. I decided to both participate in a minimally naked way . . .

. . . and report on the St. Louis edition of “Naked Bike Ride.” Yes, the message on my back was not creative. I went for the brutally clear approach.

The St. Louis organizers encouraged participants to push the nakedness to the legal limit, but not more than the limit:

[W]e also met with the police tonight. We wanted you all to know the official word after that meeting. Here’s the city ordinance that they went over with us. We are encouraging strategic coverage of the controversial areas (genitals, buttocks, breasts) but maximum exposure within the law and if people decide to bare it all you need to know that that is in violation of the ordinance and the police have to right to make arrests if there are complaints.

What goes on during Naked Bicycle Night? The cyclists have the opportunity to take a 12-mile bicycle ride on the city streets devoid of gas-slurping automobiles, along with hundreds of other concerned citizens in various states of cycling nudity.

Perhaps you are wondering whether it would be uncomfortable to ride a bicycle while naked. The national organizers dedicated several paragraphs to that topic here.

It might have been more accurate to call it Underwear Bicycle Ride, but there was, indeed, some nakedness, including several people riding totally in the nude. It was hilarious to watch the expressions of the numerous bystanders who saw the totally naked bicycle riders passing. Many of them had that look (”Oh my. It looks like . . . no, it couldn’t be . . . but maybe it is . . . but is that legal?” I would estimate that there were 500 riders tonight. We passed by a several thousand people staring out hotel and restaurant windows but many more cheering on the streets. Many people cheering knew about Naked Bicycle Ride and were lined up along portions of the route.

The crowds often shouted lots of enthusiasm, honked horns, jumped up and down and waved. As we passed through the applauding people early in the ride, a woman riding next to me said, “This is such a rush.” Indeed.

I snapped this shot as my group paused at an intersection in front of a brightly lit gas station. That’s what it’s all about, right?

There were many creative body paintings. Note this woman’s violin motif, for example. I took most of these photos while riding my bicycle, holding onto the bike with my left hand and shooting with the right, without looking through at or through the camera. Given the haphazardness of the situation, I was surprised that I was able to capture so many usable images. As you can see, this includes images of many people conveying the an unsurprisingly coherent political mood.

(more…)

After being on-the-lookout for six months, I actually found some caps with no logos at a local Walgreens.  It can really be a task to find ways to dress up without being a human billboard for a corporation.  This body is not for rent as advertising space!

Huffpo has it exactly right.   McCain won’t be helped by the images of his activities this week.

The GOP’s only hope for winning this election is to control the media and manufacture lots of falsehoods aimed at Barack Obama.

I caught this video at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. It was just too crazy to not post here too:

http://view.break.com/539758 - Watch more free videos

This is a favorite spot of mine. It’s called the Grand Basin and it’s located in the middle Forest Park in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. I enjoyed this image of the area because it contains views of some rather large objects (like the St. Louis Art Museum and a lake/fountains in front of the Museum, as well as tiny cracks on the pavement, where I took this photo (approximately 300 yards from the Museum).  I placed the camera on the ground and let it auto-shoot this scene.

I come to this spot on occasion in order to write while the sun sets. From here it’s about a 5-mile bicycle ride back to my home.

I’m sure that the people who run the corporation that operates Libby Lu stores would object to my title for this post. Too bad. What else could you say about a store that slaps unnecessary makeup and shallow-minded accessories on little girls so that they can feel like their appearance is acceptable?

I learned about Club Libby Lu from a mother who stated that she left her daughter off at a birthday party for the girl’s friend; the party was being held at club Libby Lu. When the mom came back two hours later, the girls were holding a “fashion show” at which most of them “looked like whores.” The woman was aghast and suggested she never would’ve left her daughter at this store had she known that this was what they were going to do.

I happened to be at a big mall today (the St. Louis Galleria), assisting my wife to replace her broken cell phone. While walking through the mall, I noticed a “Libby Lu.” I was carrying my camera with me and I decided to take a closer look.

I couldn’t help but notice that the store was rather crowded with young girls (aged 7 through 11) along with their mostly obese parents. The girls were crowded around two areas where they would be receiving makeup, new hairstyles and glitzy accessories. Many of the employees wore pink wings. It all seemed bizarre to me. The entire store seemed equally strange to my nine-year-old daughter, who didn’t want to have anything to do with the place. I begged her to go into the store with me, however, so I wouldn’t look like a pedophile.

Above, you can see the types of stations where the girls are made “pretty,” to the relief of their parents. Step one is to get a decent hairdo. Here are some of the hair styles that are offered to the young girls.

As you can see, the young girls can go to the “Spa.” But, remember, “To ensure proper pampering, you must call to make an appointment for a Libby Lu party” where you can get a “Libby Du.”

But why go alone? Club Libby Lu specializes in arranging parties for your daughter and her friends, all for a cost of only $40 per child. That’s what I was told by an extra-peppy employee of Libby Lu. The store presents itself as a “resort.”

Why would your young daughter do any of this? In the lingo of Club Libby Lu, you do it “2BU!” You do it because you are not sufficiently attractive if you don’t spend lots of money at Libby Lu.

Why else do you do it? According to Libby Lu, you do it to “Go on tour with your friends at Club Libby Lu.” Or you “shop till you drop at our goodie shop” (for only $25). Another good reason to spend a lot of money at Club Libby Lu is that the Jonas Brothers have arrived. I hope those pre-teenaged Jonas Brothers brought lots of condoms, in case they successfully sweep your pre-teenaged daughter off to some high-rolling nightclub, and then who knows what, given that the aim is to make your young daughter look something like this:

In case my sarcasm is going over anyone’s head, see what I really think about corporations that try to make their money by over-sexualizing young girls.  I have little tolerance for corporations that make their money by convincing little girls and their parents that they aren’t pretty enough.  Libby Lu works much harder than most of these corporations to convince young girls and their parents that there isn’t enough time to grow up as a child.

This is the definition of death-defying. Actually getting out and surviving this sport is only half the job.  If your work is not captured on video, it’s like it didn’t happen at all.

I used to work as an attorney for insurance companies.   These videos make me wonder the extent to which insurers specifically try to exclude activities this dangerous.

Eric Ruder at Dissident Voice reports on massive numbers of casualties being downplayed by the military, including the almost 20 veterans who commit suicide every day:

As for PTSD, the Pentagon officially acknowledges that 38,000 veterans have been diagnosed with it since 2003–so if the Rand study of 300,000 soldiers with PTSD is accurate, that means some 260,000 have either not sought treatment, not been diagnosed or simply aren’t being counted by the military.

This isn’t surprising, given the culture of denial that pervades the military and veterans health care system. In April, for example, an e-mail surfaced from Ira Katz, deputy chief patient care services officer for mental health at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), acknowledging that 1,000 veterans under VA care attempt suicide every month. On average, 18 veterans commit suicide in the U.S. every day, and four of those are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

To these numbers, we need to add the huge numbers of divorces, the children forced to grow up without parents (or without physically or mentally fit parents), and the fact that so many people in the world have no respect for what we are doing with our military.  Also consider the deaths and injuries our own military has inflicted on thousands of Iraqi adults and children and the millions of Iraqi citizens who have been displaced to Syria and elsewhere.

And, of course, don’t forget the number of American soldiers killed in combat.  That number is now 4113.   If you laid their bodies end to end, they would stretch almost five miles.

All for the price of . . . remind me, why is our military in Iraq?  What’s the official government position these days?

Here’s my brother-in-law Steve.  In addition to being a terrific blues guitarist, he is a philosopher.

The high cost of gas is starting to sink in.  To prove it, I saw these guys driving around yesterday.

The ocean is now washing away the Alaskan village of 400 Inupiat villagers. According to story and these interviews by DemocracyNow’s Amy Goodman, the villagers have responded by filing suit against twenty Oil, gas and electric companies, accusing them of “conspiracy to mislead the public about the causes of global warming.”

How has financing the global warming deniers contributed to this damage?

Well, the denial movement has flourished, in part, because of the preoccupation of the media with balance and with controversy. And so, if you have 3,000 scientists working for years and producing a report that says our considered opinion is the climate is changing by this much, it’s changing this fast, it’s having these effects, and you have two or three so-called denialists or a few small think tanks, some of which were certainly funded by Exxon, saying the opposite, they get equal time. The deniers get equal time in the newspapers, on the television.

Another problem is that a denier can tell a lie in a single sentence that takes a scientist three paragraphs to rebut, but the scientist never gets the three paragraphs in the sound bite culture that our media represent. And so, the denialists, even though they are small in number, they have no credible arguments, very few of them have any scientific credentials, get attention out of all proportion to their credentials, the merit of their arguments, and that delays the generation of public understanding and political will to do the things we need to do to address this challenge. There are a lot of things we can do, but we have been delaying doing them, in part because the so-called skeptics, or more accurately deniers or denialists, have basically obscured reality for much of the public and indeed for many of our policymakers.

This suit is a landmark suit in that it is the first global warming damage suit based on a conspiracy by industry players to provide misinformation.

In America, many Republican politicians, including presidential candidate John McCain, are using the recent spike in oil prices to call for increased domestic production, including opening wildlife refuges to oil drilling. In response, opponents are arguing that increased production will merely perpetuate America’s addiction to oil, worsening environmental damage and global warming. Unfortunately, both sides are missing the most important issue in this debate: the faster America drills itself dry, the sooner it will become 100% dependent on foreign sources for oil.

Wake up, America! If you think oil prices are high now, imagine what they will be when America has run out of oil and foreign suppliers have a monopoly on the supply.

The solution: curb domestic production and continue buying foreign oil. Yes, it might cost more in the short term, but this is cheap insurance for ensuring the existence of untapped domestic reserves. America already has the Strategic National Petroleum Reserve; leaving oil in the ground is simply another means of achieving the same thing: an emergency reserve. It’s the same reason why America has farm subsidies to help keep its farmers in business: to guarantee a domestic source of food, so America cannot be held hostage to feed its population. It should view its domestic oil reserves the same way.

In an article entitled “The Crowd Within,” The Economist has commented on some recent work that has expanded on the earlier and well-publicized counter-intuitive findings of James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” (2005). Surowiecki found that the aggregated guesses of non-experts were often startlingly accurate. The averaged guesses of non-expert crowds were often more accurate than detailed predictions by individual experts.  Here’s a more detailed description of Surowiecki’s surprising findings.

That’s where this new research comes in:

That problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question like “how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus” and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called “the wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it. Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.

It appears that having a single person wait for awhile and then make a second guess tends to create a situation where that person’s mind is wiped relatively clean of the first guess, so that the second guess can be somewhat independent of the first, such that averaging the two guesses together allows a phenomenon similar to that of having two people make independent guesses.

The above summary of the finding that there can be “intelligent crowds” residing in a single person’s mind reminded me of a thought that that has repeated occurred to me. I have long suspected that religion is driven by social needs, not dogmatic and certainly not intellectual. Why is it, then, that so many scientists don’t feel compelled to follow a religion or to adopt religious beliefs? My speculation is that scientists follow the crowds in their own heads, so that they are immune to the charm of real life external crowds. They thus don’t feel the need to be joiners or to espouse beliefs for the sake of pleasing crowds. Why? Scientists excel at being self-critical. They need to be self-critical or else they will be horribly embarrassed (or even have their careers destroyed) when some other scientist comes along and disproves their favorite theory.

Good scientists have the courage and skills necessary to test their own theories by attacking them inside of their own heads. They brutally challenge their own ideas to an extent that would horrify many people. The best way to get to the best idea is to cultivate lots of voices and perspectives (again, scientists excel at doing this in their own heads). The skeptics’ strategy is thus that one shouldn’t muzzle the voices in one’s own head. It’s not wise to adopt “group think” in one’s own mind, to impatiently homogenize one’s own mental narrative. Instead, good thinkers allow the voices in their heads to have free reign, at least until objective findings (especially those based on experiments) silence some or all of the alternative viewpoints. This has been my own version of “The Crowd Within.” When done well, it is an exhausting endeavor, but potentially rewarding. This way of thinking is not for the faint of mind.

I’m aware that McCain is different than Bush on a few issues.  But these are areas in which McCain has stumbled over a very low bar, indeed.  For instance, McCain has the intellectual brilliance to admit that we are terribly screwing up our environment and that energy is an issue that needs attention.   These are positions that any intelligent person would have taken at least 20 years ago.

Moveon.org has prepared this video to show some of the similarities:

After watching this, also ask yourself whether McCain is even similar to himself.

I caught this video at Funny or Die:

This was the third year I attended the National Conference for Media Reform sponsored by Free Press. This year’s conference was held in Minneapolis. As in previous media reform conferences, I was reminded about many of the hurdles faced by those American citizens who are attempting to get serious and coherent coverage of the news. By “news,” I mean the type of information that is critically important in order to prepare us to make good decisions as citizens (i.e., voting). One of the most distressing things one learns from attending the conference is that very little news is available to those watch local TV “news” and read their local “news”papers.

One of the fundamental principles of Free Press is that there cannot be a healthy democracy without a vigorous news media. The problem is that our news media is sickly, poisoned by rampant commercialism. The modern corporate media is over-consolidated to such an extent that it reflexively kowtows to political power and repeatedly refuses to challenge abuses of that power.

McChesney/Nichols - Part I

Topics covered in Part I:

• Is the media reform movement paying too much attention to Bill O’Reilly and FOX?
• The basic aims of the media reform movement.
• More on Free Press and the reason for the media reform movement.
• The problem with over-consolidation of the media.
  

Free Press stands for the proposition that there is no stark divide between journalists and citizens. Rather, there are also citizen-journalists, those of us who take media issues seriously and want to contribute important information as well as being consumers of information. This outlook dovetails nicely with the basic premise of Web 2.0. Free Press offers bloggers like me the opportunity to register at the convention as “Press.” I took advantage of that option this year (as I did last year). This allowed me several opportunities to attend sessions specifically geared to “The Press.”

This year, one of those special sessions consisted of a presentation of many of the concerns and principles of the media reform movement by two of the primary founders of the movement, Robert McChesney and John Nichols of Free Press.  Robert McChesney, a professor of Communications at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana, is widely regarded as one of the foremost media historians in the United States. Author John Nichols is a founding board member of Free Press.

I brought a cheap camcorder and a tripod to that session and I recorded the entire interview. I have now finished editing the session by summarizing the questions with title screens and breaking the session into four 10-minute segments (YouTube limits video submissions to 10 minutes or fewer).

McChesney/Nichols - Part II

Topics covered in Part II:

• Citizens versus consumers.
• Concerns regarding pharmaceutical advertising.
• Media reform and campaign finance reform.
• The kind of political candidates Big Media takes seriously.

The first half of this presentation by McChesney and Nichols occurred in a conference room; the session then spilled out into the convention center hallway for more questions. I needed to set up in a hurry for this impromptu session on the hallway. You can see that the video is not always of the highest quality (I struggled to get a clear straight line position to McChesney and Nichols), although the audio is fine and Nichols and McChesney were happy to take numerous additional questions out in the hall.

McChesney/Nichols - Part III

• Who attends media reform conferences?
• The anticipated role of big media according to the media reform movement
• The closing of foreign news bureaus.
• Candidates and media reform.
• Media and wars

This informal presentation of important media issues will be especially accessible to anyone who is new to the media reform movement. As you can see from these videos, McChesney and Nichols speak in plain yet thoughtful language (they are also terrific writers, co-authoring several recent books on the media reform movement, such as The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas.

If you’d like to get a good intuitive grasp of the media reform movement, I would recommend that you watch all four of the these segments (this will take approximately 40 minutes). For those who wish to zero in on particular issues, I have indicated the topics addressed by each of the four segments.

McChesney/Nichols - Part IV

• The lack of media coverage regarding the National Conference for Media Reform.
• The lack of media coverage regarding media reform in general.
• The need for public broadcasting networks.
• The desperate need for noncommercial programming for children.

If you find that these issues ignite your interest in the media reform movement, you can learn much more about each of these issues by visiting Free Press or visiting any of the other media reform websites listed on the homepage of Dangerous Intersection. You’ll also find numerous posts about media reform a dangerous intersection under the category “media.”

Many of the videotaped presentations from the 2008 conference are available at Free Press. Insightful articles have resulted from the 2008 conference.

I have already posted on several of the other sessions from the 2008 conference. One of those sessions concerns Phil Donahue’s new movie, “Body of War.” Another post concerns another superb documentary regarding media and the war, “War Made Easy” (this post includes an extended interview with the co-director of “war made easy,” Loretta Alper. Last but not least, the topic of the rampant commercialization of children’s programming is addressed in this post, which includes a two-part interview with Josh Golin of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

The topics addressed at the 2007 conference also remain relevant. I’ve filed about a dozen posts on the 2007 conference. Each of these DI posts is listed and described in this single DI post.

If, after watching these four videos by Bob McChesney and John Nichols, you feel distressed by what has been going on regarding Big Media, this is your opportunity to know that you are not alone and that we can truly change the entire media industry, acting together. The problem with Big Media has gotten so out of control that interest in media reform has become bi-partisan, as John Nichols comments in Part I.

Reforming the media is not a pipe dream. It is becoming more of a reality with every passing month because of the concern and oftentimes modest contributions of people like you. In fact, the theme for the 2008 conference was “Media Reform Begins with Me.” That applies to you and me and everyone else we know.

With the high price of gasoline, more people are now riding trains then ever before.  I hadn’t before seen any fuel efficiency numbers for Amtrack, but here are some from the NYT:

Oil costs hurt Amtrak, too. Fuel is projected to reach 11 percent of Amtrak’s budget this year, up from 6 percent in 2004. The railroad is not radically more energy-efficient than other means of travel. Amtrak can move a passenger a mile with 17.4 percent less fuel than a passenger car can, and about 32.9 percent less than an airline can, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

I’ve sometimes wondered what insiders think about pre-flight security. Here is a recent account by one pilot:

Before we take off, I would like to apologize on behalf of this and every airline for the hassle you just endured at the security checkpoint. As is patently obvious to any reasonable person, the humiliating shoe removals, liquids ban, and pointy-object confiscations do little to make us safer.

Unfortunately, the government insists that security theater, and not actual security, is in the nation’s best interest. If it makes you feel any better, our crew had to endure the same screening as the passengers. Never mind that the baggage loaders, cleaners, caterers, and refuelers receive only occasional random screening. You can rest easy knowing that I do not have a pair of scissors or an oversize shampoo bottle anywhere in my carry-on luggage.

Do you remember the little recital at the ticket counter prior to 9/11? They were required to ask you if any stranger asked you to carry anything in your luggage. That was back before officials realized that those who bomb planes might be willing to commit suicide in the process. I always thought it was naive to ask people if they were doing something dangerous or illegal. It was akin to a bank greeting its customers at the door: “Are you planning to rob this bank?” They should have, instead, posted a big sign at the security checkpoint with a simple list of do’s and don’ts. Something like this: “Don’t agree to carry anything on the plane for a stranger. It might be a bomb.” It’s as though the TSA hasn’t ever heard of big well-designed signs, though. It seems like most checkpoints still have security people barking the same four or five things over and over (”No big bottles of shampoo or other liquids!” “Take your computer out of its case”). There are better way to communicate simple ideas over and over–how about a video monitor that plays a well-designed security message?

Despite the silliness of some of the restrictions (my favorite was the banning of fingernail clippers), it is possible that the current version of the “security theater” has saved lives. It might intimidate someone who would otherwise try to destroy an aiplane. But are there more efficient ways to get the job done? The TSA is open to suggestions. In fact TSA has recently announced that it is going to

focus airport security more on passenger behavior and to rely less heavily on metal detectors and X-ray machines to find weapons. That reflects TSA’s new thinking that terrorists reveal their intentions through behavior, and an old reality that checkpoint machines can miss a lot of explosives, detonators and other bomb parts.

The flood waters are doing horrific damage in many places in Iowa. Down-river in St. Louis, we are not expected to sustain much damage, but you can see that the flood waters have arrived. The following photo was taken today. It shows two girls and a dog (all of them had the last name of “Vieth”) checking out the flooding of a major street near the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis.

This year’s presidential campaign offers a choice between 72-year old John McCain and 46-year old Barack Obama.  This large difference in age provoked Christopher Beam of Slate to review the scientific literature comparing the function of old brains versus younger brains.  Here are a few things to contemplate, assuming your brain is spry enough to carry out this contemplation:

As everyone with a grandparent knows, certain types of memory are affected by aging. Episodic memory—the ability to remember things that happened to you—declines. Same for prospective memory, or the ability to remember lists or agendas. You could argue these skills are less essential for a president, who has speechwriters to produce anecdotes and handlers to keep his schedule. But age also affects working memory, which we use to process, sort, and recall information on the fly. Mental arithmetic, for example, requires a good working memory. Fortunately, presidents have calculators. But working memory also translates into debating skills—the better your short-term retention, the better you can rebut your opponent’s arguments. Oldsters show fewer deficits in semantic memory, which includes vocabulary and general knowledge.

This straightforward Slate article presents many other effects of aging on the brain.

What are the reasons for voting Republican?  Here are a lot of them:

Listen to these reasons carefully, then remember to go out and vote.

Also consider this diagram of the anatomy of a Republican’s brain.

In 2006, Norman Solomon wrote War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. His book detailed the information tactics the American government uses to launch wars.

War Made Easy has been such an influential book that it has now been made into a movie of the same name. You can view it here or you can order a copy of the DVD here.

I was able to attend a viewing of “War Made Easy” last Saturday night at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis (NCMR2008). This crisply edited movie was narrated by Sean Penn. Much of what keeps this movie engaging are the dozens of carefully chosen news media clips generated during various American wars for the past 50 years, including large numbers of videos clips from the Vietnam war and the Iraq occupation. The magic of “War Made Easy” is that the directors carefully edited and arranged these clips to show us that nothing much has really changed: If an American president has decided that he wants to go to war, the watchdog American media is likely to become a lapdog and we will inevitably go to war.

Following the screening of “War Made Easy,” I attended a discussion of the movie led by media critic Norman Solomon and the co-director and producer of the movie, Loretta Alper. The following morning, Ms. Alper granted me the opportunity to interview her further regarding the making of “War Made Easy.”

Whenever we Americans go to war, we get there through a well-documented series of stages. As I watched “War Made Easy,” I saw better than ever that these stages are entirely predictable in the context of America’s warmongering ways.

Perhaps this characterization of America sounds too shrill, but just look around. The evidence is everywhere that war is a sport in America just as sports are warlike. Our TV shows and movies overflow with violence as a first-rate method of dealing with conflict. The toys we foist on our boys extol violence as the most obvious way of settling disputes. We challenge each other with statements like “support the troops,” no matter what those troops are doing (and see here ). We are all too ready to invoke the word “war,” because that word triggers a ready-made conceptual frame for freely and guiltlessly expressing ourselves with bullets, bombs and blood. In America, this frame of war is such an incredibly effective filter that we proceed to consider only the “benefits” of war and we ignore the massive damages inflicted on both war-zone civilians and upon millions of Americans (and see here).

For most Americans, it is difficult to see that we are truly a nation of warmongers. After all, we are so absolutely used to being the way we are that even the most obvious things have become difficult to see. As George Orwell once noted, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Before seeing “War Made Easy,” I was already familiar with the FAIR study documenting the manner in which our media rolled over rather than risk being accused of being unpatriotic. How much does the media roll over? So much so, that Americans see only an extremely filtered set of images representing the war. We see pictures of happy soldiers shipping out to “do their duty.” Pictures of dismembered civilian children are much too inconvenient for American patriotism, however.

Yes, Americans have become warriors looking for wars. America is a place where the thinnest of excuses will get the whole war machine revved. It is one of the points made by “War Made Easy” that America is gasoline needing only a small spark of an excuse to get us exploding off to war. Almost any excuse will do, it seems, and it doesn’t matter whether that excuse entirely false. In the 1960s, all it would took was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an incident which never actually happened at all (based upon a recently declassified NSA document and other evidence). Nonetheless, the claim of the Gulf of Tonkin incident opened the floodgates to the American military buildup in Vietnam.

In 1993, all it took was a few well-placed public officials to stir up worries about “weapons of mass destruction” that didn’t exist. At that point, the confirmation bias and the herd instinct take over. How warped has our national perspective become? Whatever any perceived outsider does, we will see in the worst possible light and we will make damned sure that every other American becomes equally xenophobic. When this level of dysfunction occurs in an individual, we call that individual mentally ill. When it occurs nationwide, we call it “patriotism.”

The above observations are necessary prelude to my understanding of “War Made Easy.” I needed to consider these issues because of a question I had trouble getting past: Why isn’t going to war easy for most countries other than the United States? One obvious answer is that most other countries have not invested in a massive military infrastructure. The U.S. is physically able go to war at the push of a button, while most other would first require a long-term military buildup. The next obvious question, though, is why most other countries have not invested in their military might to the same extent as the United States. My unfortunate conclusion is that the U.S. has a warmonger mentality. When the President of the U.S. says we need to go to war, the citizens are already half-primed to agree. This would not be the case with, for example, the Prime Minister of Norway.

“War Made Easy” is an illustration of the predictable steps that will occur as soon as the spark of a false threat hits the gasoline of American militaristic exceptionalism. We see this same pattern over and over. Here are some of the predictable steps that occur when an American president presses for war. All of these are well substantiated by “War Made Easy.”

I. Public dialogue becomes simplistic. Consider Pat Buchanan’s warning that “When the war begins, the debate ends.” The media clips offered by “War Made Easy” substantiate the claim that once war is under way, there is no more media coverage for the rationale for the war, but only for the progress of the war. Once war is under way, it is produced like a TV show. The information from the war zone is tightly controlled by the government. The media does not protest this tight control, because it desperately craves the access and the market share. Therefore, whatever labels the government gives to a battle or a war (e.g., “Shock and Awe”), the media readily embraces it.

II. The President’s case for war is always built upon deception; the official story is false or it omits numerous key facts. Instead, the case is made primarily upon spin.

III. Americans are portrayed as “reluctant fighters.” We’d rather not go to war, but circumstances are allegedly forcing our hand. (more…)

Let’s do a simple thought experiment. Let’s imagine you are the CEO of a company and you need to hire a manager to supervise some segment of your business. To keep things simple, let’s assume only two people apply for the job and that you interview both of them.

The first candidate believes you have a fantastic company with great resources, and is eager to do outstanding work that will improve the reputation of your company as well as the overall standard of living of everyone it serves.

The second candidate believes your company is a plague upon society, and is eager to dismantle and destroy as much of your company as possible.

Which candidate would you hire?

If you think this is a stupid question, because the correct answer is so clearly obvious, then let me point out that many Republican political candidates seek political office based on the beliefs of the second of the above two candidates. Many Republican candidates believe government is a plague upon society, and they are eager to dismantle and destroy as much of it as possible.

Is it any supririse, then, that when Republicans are elected to political office, failed government programs almost certainly follow? If you hire a candidate who is determined to prove your company is a failure, it should be no surprise that your company becomes one — not because your company inherently is a failure, but because you’ve hired the wrong person to manage it. Likewise, if you hire someone who believes your government can be a force for good, you will greatly increase the odds that your goverment will be a force for good; hire someone who believes your government is an evil plague, and you greatly increase the odds that your government will be an evil plague.

Bottom line: if you want your government to be a force for good, then you should not vote for people who believe your government is a plague upon society. If you do, they will surely make it one.

Every barrel of oil taken out of our planet has a cost associated with its extraction. This cost-per-barrel varies for different oil fields and also varies over time for a given oil field, which means some barrels are costlier to extract than others. When the market price for a given barrel of oil exceeds its extraction cost, that barrel becomes profitable to extract from the ground and sell. Naturally, as the price of oil increases, barrels that were profitable to extract at a previous lower price will remain profitable (in fact, will become more profitable), while other barrels that were previously unprofitable to extract at a lower price will become profitable. Thus, a higher market price for oil will increase the number of barrels that are profitable to extract, and oil companies will extract these barrels and sell them. Indeed, in some cases, entire oil fields have been shut down because the profitable barrels have already been extracted, and the additional barrels that remain in the ground are merely waiting for the day when a higher market price (or improved technology) will make those barrels profitable. All of this is basic economics and probably obvious to you.

So, why do I mention it? Because I have been hearing Bush and some Republican members of Congress this week once again calling for approval to allow oil companies to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). While it is true that oil in ANWR might (or might not) be profitable to extract at the current market price for oil, it is also true that known oil resources, in existing and fallow oil fields, have now become profitable due to the higher market price for oil. Extraction of this oil can thus commence, whether or not oil companies are allowed to drill in ANWR. Thus, the argument that higher market prices should justify drilling in ANWR is essentially invalid: high oil prices will make more known oil resources profitable, so there is no real need to drill in ANWR. The Bushites and their Big Oil pals know this, but are merely trying to exploit consumer frustration at the pump to ruin yet another wildlife area for the sake of short-term oil company profits.